Archive for March, 2006
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I have updated my inline comments form hack to be compatible with coComment. Note that if you have the comments forms visible on your main and archive pages like I do there will still be a problem there, but on item pages the values will be filled it and the coComment detector automatically invoked.
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shortText.com is a site with an interesting purpose — to post any text. Plain text only (which is nice for posting code) this site seems free and unlimited. Just enter your text in the box and click the button. A (rather random) URL is generated as a permalink to your content (example) and then you can send that URL to anyone. For those of use who run blog(s) this isn’t all that useful — after all, most content we want to post should make sense on one of our blogs, but it could be very useful to people who just want a one-time (or a few-time) publishing of something quickly and don’t want to bother with an account registration process.
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Yes, I know, another post on a Ning app of mine. Wrinks is an app for the creation/management of webrings, blogrings, linkrolls, and blogrolls. Ring/roll creators have full power over what sites are members of their wrink and wrinks can be embedded in web pages using either JavaScript or PHP (depending on your hosting situation) as either webrings or blogrolls. The service aims at being a sort of ‘social blogrolling’ system. The first person to add a site to the system has control over that site’s metadata (title, description, feedurl, etc.).
Traffic data is stored for each Wrink and wrinks can be browsed by tag, sorted by traffic number. These lists of wrinks can be syndicated via either RSS 2.0 or JSON(P). Each wrink can also be retreived via JSON(P) for custom inclusion in webpages.
Wrink rolls can also be filtered by tag. Each site on a roll has tags, and if &tag= is passed to the wrink, only sites matching that tag (or tag intersection) are returned. This opens the way for the possibility of filtering blogrolls by tag.
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Some of you may have noticed (if you didn’t, notice now! haha 😉 ) the ‘nsa blogs’ element in my sidebar. If it looks like a blogring that’s because it is. If you xanga people are wondering if it can be added to Xangas as well, it can. Such is the power of Wrinks — blogrings that can be added to any blog and that any blog can be added to! One more step towards bridging the gap to our Xanga-bound neighbours 😉 If you want to join the NSA Blogring you’ll need to go to that page, sign up for an account, and then click the ‘request to add site to wrink’ link and enter your blog’s information. I’ll check the page periodically and approve new entries onto the ring.
Worry not for tomorrow, ’cause you’ll most likely die this afternoon
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No, it’s not a new service provided by Google — it’s a Ning app built on the Google Search API. The functionality is simple. You feed Google Related Pages a URL, and it gives you back a list of related webpages. The data is collected using Google’s ‘related:’ operator. I have found in tests that it gets pretty good results when used on popular pages, but not as well when used on less popular ones.
So what is the point? Why use this instead of just doing a ‘related:’ search on Google? Isn’t this just a nicer interface to something we could already do? Not quite. You see the app also generates RSS 2.0 and JSON(P) feeds of the results. Ultimately that is the point. Results can be integrated into pages, such as blog sidebars, or watched in feedreaders. Because the data is all in the Ning app, other formats will be easy enough to add if people want them.